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Tuesday, January 11, 2011

“So act in each instance as to encourage, rather than suppress, the capacity to persuade and to be persuaded . . .” – Henry Johnstone, Jr. “Toward an Ethics of Rhetoric”

In a previous life I spent my days researching and teaching college freshmen how we reason together about disputed values. I had earned a graduate degree in that dusty old subject of “rhetoric.” Even after all these centuries, Aristotle still spoke to us and many modern thinkers had taken up his mantle.
So often we wave our hand and say, “Oh that’s just mere rhetoric” when politicians speak, meaning “Oh, that’s just nonsense or blather. They’ll say anything to get you to do what they want. It doesn’t mean anything.” Perhaps that’s the effect of Madison Ave. and political talking points taking over where philosophers, literary giants, and statesmen used to influence public discussions. We seem a bit short on Thomas Jeffersons, James Madisons, and Benjamin Franklins today.
Rhetorical theorist Wayne C. Booth dedicated his career to studying how and why words (rhetoric) stand as the thin blue line between civilization/civility and violence. Agreement must be given willingly; it can’t be coerced. His ideas were echoing in my head all weekend as the reports came in about the attempted assassination in Arizona of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the killing and wounding of so many other innocents.
Already the many political groups who have spent so much energy and public discourse trying to demonize their opponents and scare American citizens about anyone who has a different world-view than they do are denying any influence they might have had on the unbalanced mind of the man who pulled the trigger and ended the life of others. But as Booth said, ideas (and words) have consequences.
You can’t one day use words in nonstop news cycles to convince people to vote against an opponent because he is on the verge of destroying America as we know it and then the next day deny that anything you say has influenced anything someone else has done. Either words matter or they don’t.

Booth and a long line of rhetoricians back to Aristotle have argued that an ethical rhetoric is one that gains agreement and moves the world forward by emphasizing common values and cooperation rather than our greatest differences. It seems such a straightforward and civilized approach to maintaining peace rather than promoting anarchy and violence. It’s what created the Declaration of Independence and what guided Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
A few weeks ago I wrote a note to a friend of mine who lives in the United Kingdom. I asked her to explain why the student protests over tuition hikes over there had turned so violent. “In my country,” I wrote so smugly, “if we disagree with something politicians do, we just vote them out of office next time around and change the laws they passed.” I guess that’s just a quaint, antiquarian perspective now.
The year we adopted our children – 1995 – was the year of the Oklahoma City bombing. I wondered if I wanted to bring children into an America that had degenerated to this. Now they’ve seen 9/11, the demonizing of immigrants and Muslims, politicians arguing that every teacher and student should carry guns at school, questioning of the citizenship of their president, and now murder and mayhem by people posting government conspiracy theories on a mySpace page.
I hope some public leader will step forward and make the argument for my children and their generation that it is still possible to reason together about values, that words can still have good consequences. I know that I’ll continue in my imperfect way to seek understanding and agreement rather than emphasize division. I still believe an ethical rhetoric has more power than a gun. I’ll continue to believe, like Kenneth Burke, that “[y]ou persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.”

Graveside "memoires"at le Cimetière de Pejoces outside Dijon

Comments on the weekend events or your own strivings for cooperation and identification are welcome here.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

I hope I'm ready to greet the dawn of a new year like these birds on the shore of Sanibel Is., FL

(My apologies if you received a link to a non-existent post; I had to delete it and start all over when I noticed a large technical error I had made)

We’ve reached the end of the year. I hope yours was a good one, full of joy and good health. I’ve never kept a single New Year’s resolution for more than a week. And the hectic pace of December holidays has never given me much space to reflect on and learn from the year that was ending. But since I’m never one to say “never,” once again I’m trying to do what I should as the calendar changes (oh, wait . . . I forgot to buy a calendar for next year. Yikes!)

If I have limited time, though, and I want to engage in some activity of self-improvement should I give those precious hours to looking back or looking forward? While I certainly will look back at my travels, good times with friends and family, and the loved ones who left us too soon this year, I’ve decided to point myself forward.

And what am I going toward, you might ask? Well, I’ve decided that this year I am going to consistently move toward FAILURE. Yes, failure. But not how I (and probably you) have thought about it. One of my favorite blogs to check on a daily basis is Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. I’ve been reading it for a year, saying to myself “Yes, that’s a good idea,” “Oh, I really should try X,” or “Bingo, that’s exactly what I need.” Yet I never wholly jumped on the bandwagon of taking steps to make a happier life for myself. I’ve still let the same niggling things ruin my days. I still am slave to the same bad habits (Hello, my friend, Procrastination). I still haven’t made the life changes with a big “L” and a big “C” that I should to make this stage of life (the impetus for my own blog) something new and exciting.

But I’ve been reading Rubin’s book of the same name and was mesmerized by two of her concepts that brought those proverbial light bulb moments.

First, challenge and novelty lead to growth, and growth to happiness. It seems so simple, and I know I’m happier when I’m growing, but I haven’t been pushing myself toward the challenges of new things. That’s too hard, I rationalize. I might fall and it will hurt, my scared little girl on the balance beam in gym class says. But never trying new things is boring, the grownup me says.

Second, in order to have more success (or more happiness) I need to be willing to accept more failure. Rubin’s mantra: “It’s fun to fail. It’s part of being ambitious; it’s part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”

So here’s to next year and many failures – failures that will come from challenging myself in writing, in relationships, in home projects, in travels! Here’s to a year of growth!

And I’ll end this little post with thoughts from a couple of other guys who know a thing or two about failure.

Albert Einstein

Anyone who’s never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

Thomas Edison

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.

What have been your favorite failures? What would you like to fail at in the coming year? Share it here.

I feared failure on my first time kayaking, but managed to navigate the mangrove preserve

and the wide-open waters of Tarpon Bay, Sanibel Is., FL and make it back to shore

Who I am right now

I’m a Midwesterner who’s developed a desire for change as a woman reaching her midlife point. I still suck at French, but I’m working on it. I take thousands of photos (hooray, digital cameras!) but don’t always know what I’m doing. And I’m starting to write again. My goal is to keep moving in as many ways as I can until my time is up. Why don’t you join me?